Here is an excerpt from an article written by Julian Birkinshaw for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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We all know bad managers — be they ambitious and aggressive, doing whatever it takes to move up the corporate ladder, or the opposite: managers thrust into their position without the skill or the will to do the job properly.

I continue to be a little puzzled about why so many managers do such a poor job. We have known what “good management” looks like for decades, and enormous sums have been spent on programs to help managers manage better. And yet the problem endures: In a recent survey I conducted, less than a quarter of respondents would encourage others to work for their manager.

Perhaps the problem is that we’ve relied on education of positive practices. We point to the things managers should be doing, which tends to get bogged down in platitudes. For example, when Google launched a big data-driven program to identify what separated their top managers from the rest, and they ended up with bromides such as “be a good coach,” “empower your team” and “be a good communicator.”

So let’s try the opposite approach — to focus on the bad behaviours we are trying to get rid of.

Here is my stab at defining what bad management looks like, using those old favourites, the Seven Deadly Sins. I developed these ideas during seminars with executives where we discussed their experiences of good and bad management. Of course, a bit of artistic licence is necessary here, to adapt words like “greed” and “lust” to corporate life, but on the whole I think they work pretty well. I have even put a little questionnaire together to help office workers across the land to rate their line manager. Does your boss succumb to only one or two of these sins? Or is he a seven-star sinner?

I have illustrated some of the sins with examples of famous Chief Executives, because these are stories we are all familiar with. But of course the sins apply at all management levels in the organisation — they are as relevant to the first-line supervisor as they are to the big boss.

[Here are two of the seven “sins of management” that  Birkinshaw  discusses.]

A greedy boss pursues wealth, status, and growth to get himself noticed. In short, he is an empire builder, and we don’t have to look far to find examples of empire-building bosses. Perhaps the stand-out example today is Eike Batista, the Brazilian entrepreneur who has made the EBX Group (energy, mining and logistics) into Brazil’s fastest-growing company and him into the eighth-richest person in the world. Formerly married to a Playboy cover-girl, and an ex-champion powerboat racer, he has now set his sights on becoming the first person in the world to amass a $100 billion fortune.

Lust is also about vanity projects — investments or acquisitions that make no rational sense, but play to the manager’s desires. Edgar Bronfman, heir to the Seagram empire, leaps to mind here. To the “widespread astonishment” of the business world, he traded in the company’s valuable holding in chemical giant Du Pont in order to buy up Universal Studios. A quick glimpse at his vitae helps explain his motives — even in his teens he was dabbling in song-writing and movie-making.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Julian Birkinshaw is a professor at London Business School and the author of, most recently, Reinventing Management: Smarter Choices for Getting Work Done.